#1 - All OS platforms suffer from Kernel upgrade syndrome, so make sure you have the complete source code to your kernel.
#2 - Over time licensing costs will add more to the price of your product then you think. Get a flat fee license arrangement so that your license cost is fixed for the life of the product. Or use a no-license fee needed platform
#3 - Note that the Linux Kernel development path is maturing and slowing down. 2.6 is very featureful and will be an ok place to be for a long time.
#4 - Security, If your device can be owned by a remotely delivered virus you will have huge support problems. Consider this when designing in connectivity for the device.
#5 - Real-time response requirements. There are very few real reasons to have a real time OS in a consumer appliance, but - if your application needs it then it really needs it. You must make sure that your platform is truly a real time OS. Don't get confused by "near real time" capabilities of some platforms. A true real time OS will respond to an interrupt within a specific, finite, (and small) time period everytime. If it can't, its not a real time OS.
From rick Sat Jun 1 23:01:17 2002 Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2002 23:01:17 -0700 To: Peter Belew (peterbe@sonic.net) Cc: jtsmoore@pacificnet.net, SlugLug (sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu) Subject: Re: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.27
deleted.......
But rather than dwell on all that, I thought I'd address this bit about Bill Gates's "Open Letter to Hobbyists",[1] which Peter Belew dragged into the discussion.
Peter, I happen to be one of the old-timers, too, and my memory is perhaps a little better than yours. The letter was not to the Homebrew Computer Club (of which I was a member at the time), but rather to a the MITS Altair Users' Newsletter, in New Mexico. David Bunnell was then newsletter editor, and he lobbed a copy to us at the Homebrew club, among other people. Which is how we got it. (And this was in early 1976, not 1977.)
The letter caused quite a flap. For one thing, this complaint from the General Partner of "Micro-Soft" over in Albuquerque wasn't entirely honest. The software in question had been created on a taxpayer-subsidised PDP-10 (running an 8080 emulator) at Harvard, and also there was very strong, reasonable suspicion that Gates, Allen, and Davidoff had "borrowed" from several other people's BASIC inplementations without their authors' permission.
Also, and less relevantly, Micro-Soft was already getting a reputation for questionable business deals: If you were buying MITS dodgy boards, Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC was $150. If not, the same product was $500, which was a hell of lot in those days. Which was not a good reason to misappropriate it, although the questionable ancestry of Micro-Soft's 4kB interpreter arguably was.
1920 America was not perfect, clearly, but The American citizens had two things nobody in China has to this day:
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And they have made all the difference. (No, they haven't been perfectly or equally applied, still working on that and will be forever )
Yes, The Chinese police/military can and do still brutalize people half to death and the victims (and their families) have no rights and no way to redress the situation. Look at some other (non-US) press sources for info on this. In the US when the Police do this, they can be caught and punished and the municipality who employed them can be sued for compensation. (Sadly, not all bad cops get caught, but life has no guarantees).
Many of us,including me, are skeptical about the US being a "just and righteous" country, but overall, most of the time, the US system protects people from being abused by their government.[As long as Alito doesn't get on the Supreme court, that is, and leaving aside the most recent excursion by the current so called "administration" ]
In China, the only redress an person victimized by the government has is to get their plight in front of the global press, and that almost never happens.
Quick Quiz - Where is the worlds largest water power project being done? (No Peeking at Wikipedia or Google..)
> well, rebooting, or at least restarting the offending > daemon/application (which is the same thing really) > works pretty well on Linux too.
No, I can't let that go unchallenged. Rebooting an entire system Is nothing like re-starting one program. Take, for example, the server that sits under my desk: I can restart the word processor over and over again without affecting the other functions on the system.
Even if the word processor or my entire desktop gets hung I can login from another system and kill the offending process and restart it.
And throughout all of that the Sendmail system and spam filtering will continue to work without a hiccup. And the same for the MP3 file serving for all the persons listening to music in the building, and the same for file serving, and the same for six thin clients running their desktops on the server, (Bless LTSP and Jim McQillan, (JAMCQ)), and the same for the voicemail system and the same for the web server.
All those functions work just fine on one server. Serving 35 people in one small business, some Linux and some MS desktops
No - I will not reboot the server at whim..... and I don't need to either.
"Rule #10 - The Holy Grail of Tech Support is the reboot"
If you believe this or if you need this, you are running a POS operating system and its probably from Microsoft.
That this would even be considered a rule by a professional IT worker is all the proof we need that Bill Gates has caused more damage than he can ever hope to make up for.
His name is "Linus", "linux" is the operating System's name.
And just as accurate is your claim that having a text input box the only pops AFTER the user starts typing a name is a "GOOD THING".
Requiring a user to be omniscient in order to understand how to use a tool is a VERY BAD IDEA!
Here, Read this:
Basics of the Unix Philosophy
The 'Unix philosophy' originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
The Unix philosophy is not a formal design method. It wasn't handed down from the high fastnesses of theoretical computer science as a way to produce theoretically perfect software. Nor is it that perennial executive's mirage, some way to magically extract innovative but reliable software on too short a deadline from unmotivated, badly managed, and underpaid programmers.
The Unix philosophy (like successful folk traditions in other engineering disciplines) is bottom-up, not top-down. It is pragmatic and grounded in experience. It is not to be found in official methods and standards, but rather in the implicit half-reflexive knowledge, the expertise that the Unix culture transmits. It encourages a sense of proportion and skepticism -- and shows both by having a sense of (often subversive) humor.
Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes and one of the founders of the Unix tradition, had this to say at the time [McIlroy78]:
(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.
(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.
He later summarized it this way (quoted in A Quarter Century of Unix [Salus]):
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
Rob Pike, who became one of the great masters of C, offers a slightly different angle in Notes on C Programming [Pike]:
Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.
Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)
Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.
Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.[9]
Gnome has three problems all centered around how it manages its applications: #1 All applications store their configuration data together in one place #2 Configuration data is not human readable or editable. #3 Configuration data is not designed to be easily read and manipulated by other UNIX tools (All Data is an XML markup format and can only be manipulated by tools which are schema aware and schema compliant)
This duplicates all of the worst design characteristics of the Windows Registry system.
The gnome design approach is deeply and fundamentally flawed.
The biggest problem with gnome is its design "decision" to copy the Windows Registry paradigm. "decision" is in quotes because I am guessing that the Gnome designers just automatically used that type of design after being exposed to windows.
Every Gnome app is broken. Why:
Because every Gnome app must register all of its configuration and setting information in the gnome "registration system" which is primarily a functional copy of the worst design decision Microsoft ever made.
(Or their best one since it forces many home users to buy a new computer every three years, cause "this one is slowing down too much")
The Windows registry system forces all application thru the same choke point containing a data set the grows rapidly and continuously over time.
As the data set (Registry info) becomes larger and larger the speed of access to the registry gets slower and slower, finally dragging the system to its knees.
At this point, unless the user has professional help advising them to reformat and re-install everything, a task which most fear deeply and reasonably avoid, many users will go out and buy a new Windows PC and start the same cycle all over again.
What has this to do with Gnome?
Simple. Gnome has the same problem and they got there by ignoring the most basic design principles of UNIX put forth by the creators of UNIX in 1978 in the July/August edition of the Bell System Technical Journal.
These design principles can be summarized by one statement: Keep It Simple Stupid.
Every book or article published about the UNIX design philosophy all say the same thing and yet, GNOME broke those rules.
How to fix it: Decentralize config info collections use human readable/editable text in config files make sure that the config data can be manipulated by traditional Unix tools when used as filters.
Until these changes are made Gnome is a more a Windows system than a *NIX tool.
Clearly you knew what you were doing... this time.
IFF you can do this 95% of the time then obviously the smart thing to do is find yourself a salesperson and go into the consulting business doing this type of work.
As soon as you have to start paying the salary for the salesperson, the overhead of running your business and doing the tapdance of handling more than one client at a time while simultaneously trying to land more work for the near future you will probably understand exactly where your boss was coming from.
( tap tap tap...shufflin' off to Buffalo...tap tap )
All Jimmy Wales actually said was that two articles were terribly written. Wales has always had a goal of high quality in Wikipedia. Having two poorly written articles out of over three quarters of a million is hardly an admission of "Quality problems" except for the two particular articles cited. (yes, there are other articles that need work as well.)
The real issue here is the repeated attacks by this reporter: Remember Andrew Orlowski is the same reporter who wrote about Wikipedia :
""""It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers,"... which seems as good a description as any to us."""
Clearly Andrew has found that Wikipedia bashing is an easy meal ticket and that is the actual source of his over-exaggerated headline writing. Orlonski needs to get paid and he needs his editors to view him as a positive asset, drawing lots of eyeballs to the Register website. A quick Google for Orlowski and Wikipedia shows a long, slanted history for our boy Andy.
There is a verb for this: "Dvoraking" "To Dvorak" "The act of trolling by a supposedly 'professional' journalist in order to draw visitors to a webpage generating hits for the paid advertisements."
In fact, given this background information Andrew Orlowski has less real credibility than, say, your average slashdot poster.:-).
Orlowski isn't a total waste of time however. After all he has noted that: "Segway's brains head for toy robot", "Microsoft FAT patent rejected - again", and the incredible "Police stake out bar, hoping to catch man drunk"
Wow, Andrew! Whats next? I wait in breathless anticipation.
(What, proofread this? not worth the time, Andrew.)
Can only light up fixtures which are on the top floor of the building and within 20 feet of the collector.
Uses moving parts
Very poor solution.
Come back and talk to me when:
#1 uses a flat prismatic surface (Think sheets of Nano-sized fresnel structures)
#2 no moving parts (hint - its done with mirrors!)
#3 can use almost entire surface of building (why only use top of building? Only exempt the windows!)
#4 can transmit light to fixtures 80 floors away with low loss. (Now your talking major Urban deplaoyment!, even a 60 story building with underground parking garage gets lit!)
Satellite-dish like structure, requires moving parts, tracks sun to keep optical focus point on light collector which routes sunlight into plastic fibers, which can only transmit light to "fixtures which should lie within a 20 foot radius circle centered on the solar collector mount." And those fixtures can only be on the top floor of the building.
There are a number of things that can be done to speed up the booting of a Linux system. The most significant of which is to start many of the services concurrently as opposed to the current practice many distros have of launching them one at a time, then wait to see if it fails or works before launching the next one.
By launching them concurrently (subject to dependency constraints) the startup time can be shortened to a small fraction of the current time needed.
How exactly would you suggest that they improve their software to prevent spam and phishing?"
Easy:
Build a PGP based site identity verification infrastructure deployed in the DNS distributed style with trusted root servers.
Add an automatic PGP site identity verifaction to web browsing (IE) and email (Outlook,Exchange) which uses that infrastructure.
Make all the IP needed to implement same F/OSS and pay for the hardware and web connections of the root servers, which would be serving mostly tier 1 and 2 internet carriers. MS could even use the existing DNS and PGP code bases.
Improve the security of MS-Win software so that its at least as difficult to zombie a Win system as it is a Linux system.
Ahem, for those who think that Win systems are zombied more frequently simply because there are more of them, please do some googling and look at all the articles describing how Microsoft's design decisions are the actual reasons why MS systems are the chief virii carriers and propagators on the net.
Note that this boss is unable to keep any technical employees for any length of time.
What does that say about how he/she has been treating you since the other guys left?
Two weeks notice is all you need to give to be courteous. If they get abusive or coercive in any fashion (even simply laying a guilt trip on you), reduce it to one week, then to no notice.
Any other work you want to do for them beyond the two weeks- charge $85-$100 per hour and require a four hour minimum for anything done at their site, and a one hour minimum for anything done remotely.
Since this small comapny seems to be pretty, umm, well lets just say that it may be likely that you can't trust them at all, you may want to require payment in advance for any work done.
Traditional silicon-cell solar panels are too expensive and too fragile for robust, long term applications. This severely limits Solar panel technology feasable applications.
A better technology has been created. "Solar Fabrics". Several companies are using "Nano-materials" based on titanium-oxide to do "roll to roll" printing of Solar-to-electric energy fabric. Cost is less, is much more rugged,integrates with buildings better, more usable capture space. Yield not equal to Solar Panels, but it is new and is improving. It is likely to surpass traditional panels on a volts per unit of area basis.
Two companies already doing this:
konarka and nanosolar:
One possible application: building materials (roofing, exterior siding) which can generate power.
Price for the hardware seems high. Just take one of these devices below:
http://purchase.winstation.com/mall/Flash_Disk_Mod ule_Horizontal.asp
http://www.disklessworkstations.com/cgi-bin/web/in fo/fdm.html?id=IUiSsDnP
http://www.idotpc.com/TheStore/Desktop/890Spec.asp ?Product.id=890&Cate.id=11
And flash it with LTSP ( http://www.ltsp.org ) and you have the same thing. Plug it into an old PC, and you have an instant thin client which doesn't need to boot over the network. The kernel is embedded and LTSP supports pretty much all of the services listed for this device, and it looks like they will be adding support for "FreeNX" same as asterisk.
Genetic musclular/coordination potential, as determined by ones genetic composition, is only one part of what makes a champion. The other factors, training, coaching and drilling on technique, mental toughness (How nutured/mentored), opportunity and desire also contribute. Some of these are totaly random but all contribute to the outcome. Fail to have anyone of them, and even if you have a superior gene map, you won't win.
http://openkiosk.sourceforge.net/
This package may do what you want. It has clients for both Windows and Linux boxes. I believe that it may need a Linux server to control things, but I'm not sure.
One small reason your DNS server (MyDNS) isn't catching on is that it requires an external DB server process to be set up and running on the system.
I took a look at your system with the intent to try it out but I stopped as soon as I saw that requirement.
True, Its not that huge an extra requirement, but it is an extra step and an extra external dependency.
Adding an internal db (like dbm) to your system so that its self contained would increase the likelyhood of adoption for MyDNS.
Having to run a fairly costly, (In terms of system resources), 3rd party DBMS system in order to have an active DNS server seems a little upside down to me.
I'm using the AMD CPU on my personal system right now. If I were trying to generate FUD I would have just blasted away instead of asking for information.
According to my limited stab, googling for info, it looks like AMD still doesn't have the down-clock protection on its CPU's. Thats too bad.
I was hopinfg that someone would point me at info saying otherwise.
I would really like to be able to use them in my client installations but I can't really recommend them for anyplace that doesn't have 7x24 staff within hearing distance of any audible thermal alarms.
I did learn that there are some MB's which will try to save the AMD CPU from cooking itself and that is encouraging. Still - I won't be recommending AMD for Aunt Tillie or my small customers until the AMD CPU's or virtually every AMD capable MB out there has some way of protecting the AMD CPU's from self destruction.
That way I will get fewer "middle of the night" emergency calls.
#1 - Go wireless. For both network and power. Don't put any AC current anywhere near the pool!
#2 - Think Dark places -Stay in the shade. Install/build shade if you have no alternative, especially next to the pool. Go for blocking out as much sunlight as possible.
#4 - LTSP.org - Use your laptop as a wireless thin client. It reduces local CPU power consumption, extends the life of your battery, and your server, (any desktop machine), does all the heavy lifting so you can still go fast.
#5 Cheap Sunglasses and a hat. Brim helps block out sunlight, Iris will dilate just "a leetle bit" so you can see the screen easier.
#6 Pump spray bottle of sunblock! SPF 30+
#7 Ice tea. (Or caffinated beverage of choice)
#8 Extra towels
Re here comes the "Bolo, Mark I" "Obsequious"
on
When Robots Play Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Given the difficult time the better equipped US forces are having "winning the peace" (since the "war" has been declared to be "won".) in Iraq, I'm sure that political pressure to not let any more US soldiers get killed will cause the military to look at using this same technique to create robots which will be able to replace the US foot soldier in as many scenarios as possible.
They already have a backpackable mobile remote "eyeballs" robot that can roam building interiors while sending back pictures and other sensory data to the soldiers outside. Its not far from there to have a semi-autonomous small caliber weapon carrying robot which has been combat trained the same way these capture the flag bots were.
After many generations, once the training is complete the "State of mind" of the most successfull 'bots can be duplicated and copied into as many "x-thousand" of the little buggers as you want.
There is, of course, the small detail of solving the IFF (Interogate, Friend or Foe?) issue.
And how would the robot know when an enemy wanted to surrender to it ?
(Just a leetle closer lil' fella - I won't hurt you, I just want to surr (CrunCH!)... oops. excuse me. Did I step on you? )
Slashdot Mirror
#1 - All OS platforms suffer from Kernel upgrade syndrome, so make sure you have the complete source code to your kernel.
#2 - Over time licensing costs will add more to the price of your product then you think. Get a flat fee license arrangement so that your license cost is fixed for the life of the product. Or use a no-license fee needed platform
#3 - Note that the Linux Kernel development path is maturing and slowing down. 2.6 is very featureful and will be an ok place to be for a long time.
#4 - Security, If your device can be owned by a remotely delivered virus you will have huge support problems. Consider this when designing in connectivity for the device.
#5 - Real-time response requirements. There are very few real reasons to have a real time OS in a consumer appliance, but - if your application needs it then it really needs it. You must make sure that your platform is truly a real time OS. Don't get confused by "near real time" capabilities of some platforms. A true real time OS will respond to an interrupt within a specific, finite, (and small) time period everytime. If it can't, its not a real time OS.
He should be requied to participate in that new Olympic event, the 4 way Tractor pull.
1 spammer, 4 tractors, spammer in the middle, each tractor pulls the spammer in a different direction.
Driver who ends up with the smallest piece of spammer wins!
Seen at:http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Legacy_Microsoft/alta ir-basic.html
e tter-to-hobbyists.html, among other places.
From rick Sat Jun 1 23:01:17 2002
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2002 23:01:17 -0700
To: Peter Belew (peterbe@sonic.net)
Cc: jtsmoore@pacificnet.net, SlugLug (sluglug@sluglug.ucsc.edu)
Subject: Re: [SlugLUG] RevolutionOS showing
User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.27
deleted.......
But rather than dwell on all that, I thought I'd address this bit about Bill Gates's "Open Letter to Hobbyists",[1] which Peter Belew dragged into the discussion.
Peter, I happen to be one of the old-timers, too, and my memory is perhaps a little better than yours. The letter was not to the Homebrew Computer Club (of which I was a member at the time), but rather to a the MITS Altair Users' Newsletter, in New Mexico. David Bunnell was then newsletter editor, and he lobbed a copy to us at the Homebrew club, among other people. Which is how we got it. (And this was in early 1976, not 1977.)
The letter caused quite a flap. For one thing, this complaint from the General Partner of "Micro-Soft" over in Albuquerque wasn't entirely honest. The software in question had been created on a taxpayer-subsidised PDP-10 (running an 8080 emulator) at Harvard, and also there was very strong, reasonable suspicion that Gates, Allen, and Davidoff had "borrowed" from several other people's BASIC inplementations without their authors' permission.
Also, and less relevantly, Micro-Soft was already getting a reputation for questionable business deals: If you were buying MITS dodgy boards, Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC was $150. If not, the same product was $500, which was a hell of lot in those days. Which was not a good reason to misappropriate it, although the questionable ancestry of Micro-Soft's 4kB interpreter arguably was.
deleted.........
[1] Readable at http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Legacy_Microsoft/open-l
[2] Nitpickers have noted that the concept was not unknown in parts of the mainframe world. But it was an unwelcome surprise to microcomputerists.
"Credit Card" sized cards w/ a display on them for one time passwords have been in use for 10 years.
i d=
They are used primarily for authorizing logins to secure systems.
See "securID card" from RSA Security
http://www.rsasecurity.com/node.asp?id=1338&node_
Wow - what an amzingly ignorant ....
1920 America was not perfect, clearly, but The American citizens had two things nobody in China has to this day:
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And they have made all the difference.
(No, they haven't been perfectly or equally applied, still working on that and will be forever )
Yes, The Chinese police/military can and do still brutalize people half to death and the victims (and their families) have no rights and no way to redress the situation. Look at some other (non-US) press sources for info on this. In the US when the Police do this, they can be caught and punished and the municipality who employed them can be sued for compensation. (Sadly, not all bad cops get caught, but life has no guarantees).
Many of us,including me, are skeptical about the US being a "just and righteous" country, but overall, most of the time, the US system protects people from being abused by their government.[As long as Alito doesn't get on the Supreme court, that is, and leaving aside the most recent excursion by the current so called "administration" ]
In China, the only redress an person victimized by the government has is to get their plight in front of the global press, and that almost never happens.
Quick Quiz - Where is the worlds largest water power project being done? (No Peeking at Wikipedia or Google..)
> well, rebooting, or at least restarting the offending
> daemon/application (which is the same thing really)
> works pretty well on Linux too.
No, I can't let that go unchallenged. Rebooting an entire system
Is nothing like re-starting one program. Take, for example, the
server that sits under my desk: I can restart the word processor
over and over again without affecting the other functions on the system.
Even if the word processor or my entire desktop gets hung I can login
from another system and kill the offending process and restart it.
And throughout all of that the Sendmail system and spam filtering
will continue to work without a hiccup. And the same for the MP3
file serving for all the persons listening to music in the building,
and the same for file serving, and the same for six thin clients
running their desktops on the server, (Bless LTSP and Jim McQillan,
(JAMCQ)), and the same for the voicemail system and the same for
the web server.
All those functions work just fine on one server. Serving 35 people
in one small business, some Linux and some MS desktops
No - I will not reboot the server at whim..... and I don't need to either.
"Rule #10 - The Holy Grail of Tech Support is the reboot"
If you believe this or if you need this, you are running a
POS operating system and its probably from Microsoft.
That this would even be considered a rule by a professional IT
worker is all the proof we need that Bill Gates has caused
more damage than he can ever hope to make up for.
What utter crap.
His name is "Linus", "linux" is the operating System's name.
And just as accurate is your claim that having a text input box the only pops AFTER the user starts typing a name is a "GOOD THING".
Requiring a user to be omniscient in order to understand how to use a tool is a VERY BAD IDEA!
Here, Read this:
Basics of the Unix Philosophy
The 'Unix philosophy' originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
The Unix philosophy is not a formal design method. It wasn't handed down from the high fastnesses of theoretical computer science as a way to produce theoretically perfect software. Nor is it that perennial executive's mirage, some way to magically extract innovative but reliable software on too short a deadline from unmotivated, badly managed, and underpaid programmers.
The Unix philosophy (like successful folk traditions in other engineering disciplines) is bottom-up, not top-down. It is pragmatic and grounded in experience. It is not to be found in official methods and standards, but rather in the implicit half-reflexive knowledge, the expertise that the Unix culture transmits. It encourages a sense of proportion and skepticism -- and shows both by having a sense of (often subversive) humor.
Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes and one of the founders of the Unix tradition, had this to say at the time [McIlroy78]:
(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.
(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
(iii) Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
(iv) Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.
He later summarized it this way (quoted in A Quarter Century of Unix [Salus]):
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
Rob Pike, who became one of the great masters of C, offers a slightly different angle in Notes on C Programming [Pike]:
Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.
Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)
Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.
Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.[9]
Rule 6. T
Gnome has three problems all centered around how it manages its applications:
#1 All applications store their configuration data together in one place
#2 Configuration data is not human readable or editable.
#3 Configuration data is not designed to be easily read and manipulated by other UNIX tools (All Data is an XML markup format and can only be manipulated by tools which are schema aware and schema compliant)
This duplicates all of the worst design characteristics of the Windows Registry system.
The gnome design approach is deeply and fundamentally flawed.
The biggest problem with gnome is its design "decision" to copy the
Windows Registry paradigm. "decision" is in quotes because I am guessing that the Gnome designers just automatically used that type of design after being exposed to windows.
Every Gnome app is broken. Why:
Because every Gnome app must register all of its configuration and
setting information in the gnome "registration system" which is primarily
a functional copy of the worst design decision Microsoft ever made.
(Or their best one since it forces many home users to buy a new computer
every three years, cause "this one is slowing down too much")
The Windows registry system forces all application thru the same choke
point containing a data set the grows rapidly and continuously over time.
As the data set (Registry info) becomes larger and larger the speed of
access to the registry gets slower and slower, finally dragging the system to
its knees.
At this point, unless the user has professional help advising them to reformat
and re-install everything, a task which most fear deeply and reasonably
avoid, many users will go out and buy a new Windows
PC and start the same cycle all over again.
What has this to do with Gnome?
Simple. Gnome has the same problem and they got there by ignoring the
most basic design principles of UNIX put forth by the creators of UNIX in
1978 in the July/August edition of the Bell System Technical Journal.
These design principles can be summarized by one statement:
Keep It Simple Stupid.
Every book or article published about the UNIX design philosophy all say
the same thing and yet, GNOME broke those rules.
How to fix it:
Decentralize config info collections
use human readable/editable text in config files
make sure that the config data can be manipulated by traditional Unix tools
when used as filters.
Until these changes are made Gnome is a more a Windows system than a *NIX
tool.
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeccccccchhhhhhhhhhh.
Clearly you knew what you were doing... this time.
IFF you can do this 95% of the time then obviously the smart thing to do is find yourself a salesperson and go into the consulting business doing this type of work.
As soon as you have to start paying the salary for the salesperson, the overhead of running your business and doing the tapdance of handling more than one client at a time while simultaneously trying to land more work for the near future you will probably understand exactly where your boss was coming from.
( tap tap tap...shufflin' off to Buffalo...tap tap )
All Jimmy Wales actually said was that two articles were terribly written. Wales has always had a goal of high quality in Wikipedia. Having two poorly written articles out of over three quarters of a million is hardly an admission of "Quality problems" except for the two particular articles cited. (yes, there are other articles that need work as well.)
... which seems as good a description as any to us."""
:-).
The real issue here is the repeated attacks by this reporter: Remember Andrew Orlowski is the same reporter who wrote about Wikipedia :
""""It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers,"
Clearly Andrew has found that Wikipedia bashing is an easy meal ticket and that is the actual source of his over-exaggerated headline writing. Orlonski needs to get paid and he needs his editors to view him as a positive asset, drawing lots of eyeballs to the Register website. A quick Google for Orlowski and Wikipedia shows a long, slanted history for our boy Andy.
There is a verb for this: "Dvoraking" "To Dvorak"
"The act of trolling by a supposedly 'professional' journalist in order to draw visitors to a webpage generating hits for the paid advertisements."
In fact, given this background information Andrew Orlowski has less real credibility than, say, your average slashdot poster.
Orlowski isn't a total waste of time however. After all he has noted that: "Segway's brains head for toy robot", "Microsoft FAT patent rejected - again", and the incredible "Police stake out bar, hoping to catch man drunk"
Wow, Andrew! Whats next? I wait in breathless anticipation.
(What, proofread this? not worth the time, Andrew.)
Can only light up fixtures which are on the top floor of the building and within 20 feet of the collector.
Uses moving parts
Very poor solution.
Come back and talk to me when:
#1 uses a flat prismatic surface
(Think sheets of Nano-sized fresnel structures)
#2 no moving parts
(hint - its done with mirrors!)
#3 can use almost entire surface of building
(why only use top of building? Only exempt the windows!)
#4 can transmit light to fixtures 80 floors away with low loss.
(Now your talking major Urban deplaoyment!, even a 60 story building with underground parking garage gets lit!)
Satellite-dish like structure, requires moving parts, tracks sun to keep optical focus point on light collector which routes sunlight into plastic
fibers, which can only transmit light to "fixtures which should lie within a 20 foot radius circle centered on the solar collector mount." And those fixtures can only be on the top floor of the building.
If you are a Linux user, the correct wording for that phrase is:
Not that I care much; how often do I boot in a Year?
By launching them concurrently (subject to dependency constraints) the startup time can be shortened to a small fraction of the current time needed.
There are articles on how to do this and not get bitten by the dependency issues: http://www.google.com/linux?num=100&hl=en&lr=lang_ en&safe=off&q=parallel+boot+processes&lr=lang_en
Easy:
Build a PGP based site identity verification infrastructure deployed in the DNS distributed style with trusted root servers.
Add an automatic PGP site identity verifaction to web browsing (IE) and email (Outlook,Exchange) which uses that infrastructure.
Make all the IP needed to implement same F/OSS and pay for the hardware and web connections of the root servers, which would be serving mostly tier 1 and 2 internet carriers. MS could even use the existing DNS and PGP code bases.
Improve the security of MS-Win software so that its at least as difficult to zombie a Win system as it is a Linux system.
Ahem, for those who think that Win systems are zombied more frequently simply because there are more of them, please do some googling and look at all the articles describing how Microsoft's design decisions are the actual reasons why MS systems are the chief virii carriers and propagators on the net.
Here is one:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/index.php?page=vir us#virus4/
And an excellent overview of the design/architectural differences beween OSes is here:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch03s02.html
Note that this boss is unable to keep any technical employees for any length of time.
What does that say about how he/she has been treating you since the other guys left?
Two weeks notice is all you need to give to be courteous. If they get abusive or coercive in any fashion (even simply laying a guilt trip on you), reduce it to one week, then to no notice.
Any other work you want to do for them beyond the two weeks- charge $85-$100 per hour and require a four hour minimum for anything done at their site, and a one hour minimum for anything done remotely.
Since this small comapny seems to be pretty, umm, well lets just say that it may be likely that you can't trust them at all, you may want to require payment in advance for any work done.
A better technology has been created. "Solar Fabrics". Several companies are using "Nano-materials" based on titanium-oxide to do "roll to roll" printing of Solar-to-electric energy fabric. Cost is less, is much more rugged ,integrates with buildings better, more usable capture space. Yield not equal to Solar Panels, but it is new and is improving. It is likely to surpass traditional panels on a volts per unit of area basis.
Two companies already doing this: konarka and nanosolar:
One possible application: building materials (roofing, exterior siding) which can generate power.
http://www.konarka.com/ http://www.nanosolar.com/
Price for the hardware seems high. Just take one of these devices below:d ule_Horizontal.asp
http://www.disklessworkstations.com/cgi-bin/web/in fo/fdm.html?id=IUiSsDnP
http://www.idotpc.com/TheStore/Desktop/890Spec.asp ?Product.id=890&Cate.id=11
http://purchase.winstation.com/mall/Flash_Disk_Mo
And flash it with LTSP ( http://www.ltsp.org ) and you have the same thing. Plug it into an old PC, and you have an instant thin client which doesn't need to boot over the network. The kernel is embedded and LTSP supports pretty much all of the services listed for this device, and it looks like they will be adding support for "FreeNX" same as asterisk.
Genetic musclular/coordination potential, as determined by ones genetic composition, is only one part of what makes a champion. The other factors, training, coaching and drilling on technique, mental toughness (How nutured/mentored), opportunity and desire also contribute. Some of these are totaly random but all contribute to the outcome. Fail to have anyone of them, and even if you have a superior gene map, you won't win.
http://openkiosk.sourceforge.net/ This package may do what you want. It has clients for both Windows and Linux boxes. I believe that it may need a Linux server to control things, but I'm not sure.
One small reason your DNS server (MyDNS) isn't catching on is that it requires an external DB server process to be set up and running on the system.
I took a look at your system with the intent to try it out but I stopped as soon as I saw that requirement.
True, Its not that huge an extra requirement, but it is an extra step and an extra external dependency.
Adding an internal db (like dbm) to your system so that its self contained would increase the likelyhood of adoption for MyDNS.
Having to run a fairly costly, (In terms of system resources), 3rd party DBMS system in order to have an active DNS server seems a little upside down to me.
I'm using the AMD CPU on my personal system right now. If I were trying to generate FUD I would have just blasted away instead of asking for information.
According to my limited stab, googling for info, it looks like AMD still doesn't have the down-clock protection on its CPU's. Thats too bad.
I was hopinfg that someone would point me at info saying otherwise.
I would really like to be able to use them in my client installations but I can't really recommend them for anyplace that doesn't have 7x24 staff within hearing distance of any audible thermal alarms.
I did learn that there are some MB's which will try to save the AMD CPU from cooking itself and that is encouraging. Still - I won't be recommending AMD for Aunt Tillie or my small customers until the AMD CPU's or virtually every AMD capable MB out there has some way of protecting the AMD CPU's from self destruction.
That way I will get fewer "middle of the night" emergency calls.
Interesting that you posted anonymously.
I heard that Intel CPU's used to automagically reduce their clock rate when their temperature got too high.
This feature caused some businesses I know to forgo choosing any AMD cpu, since it couldn't protect itself in the event of an unattended fan failure.
First question - does the clocking down feature really exist on Intel CPU's? and second question, Does AMD have this feature yet?
From experience, the following are useful.
#0 - Laptop - easily moved and re-moved
#1 - Go wireless. For both network and power. Don't put any AC current anywhere near the pool!
#2 - Think Dark places -Stay in the shade. Install/build shade if you have no alternative, especially next to the pool. Go for blocking out as much sunlight as possible.
#4 - LTSP.org - Use your laptop as a wireless thin client. It reduces local CPU power consumption, extends the life of your battery, and your server, (any desktop machine), does all the heavy lifting so you can still go fast.
#5 Cheap Sunglasses and a hat. Brim helps block out sunlight, Iris will dilate just "a leetle bit" so you can see the screen easier.
#6 Pump spray bottle of sunblock! SPF 30+
#7 Ice tea. (Or caffinated beverage of choice)
#8 Extra towels
Given the difficult time the better equipped US forces are having "winning the peace" (since the "war" has been declared to be "won".) in Iraq, I'm sure that political pressure to not let any more US soldiers get killed will cause the military to look at using this same technique to create robots which will be able to replace the US foot soldier in as many scenarios as possible.
They already have a backpackable mobile remote "eyeballs" robot that can roam building interiors while sending back pictures and other sensory data to the soldiers outside. Its not far from there to have a semi-autonomous small caliber weapon carrying robot which has been combat trained the same way these capture the flag bots were.
After many generations, once the training is complete the "State of mind" of the most successfull 'bots can be duplicated and copied into as many "x-thousand" of the little buggers as you want.
There is, of course, the small detail of solving the IFF (Interogate, Friend or Foe?) issue.
And how would the robot know when an enemy wanted to surrender to it ?
(Just a leetle closer lil' fella - I won't hurt you, I just want to surr (CrunCH!)... oops. excuse me. Did I step on you? )